I was again pondering my dumb cosplay life because I randomly checked Dokidoki for the first time in months and I noticed that they’re polling for whether or not to make a Bennett (from Genshin Impact) cosplay and I of course put in my $5 to show my interest, which means i guess that Bennett is probably going to be my next kigu mask

maybe

Ugh I don’t even have anywhere to show him off yet ah well. I sort of wanted to make a female kig character but maybe I’m stuck with the guys for now lmao

I keep thinking how ridiculous this all is but it makes me So Damn Happy just to think about cosplaying as these guys, that I embody these characters in the physical world and they don’t even exist if I don’t lend them my body. I mean, the whole point of kig is to completely disappear into the character, and I really love that. As a person who has very complicated thoughts about my own identity and who I am. I often wanted to disappear and not be myself. Not being able to live up to my mom’s expectations of what she wanted a daughter to be. She miscarried before and after me, so I should’ve been the middle child. And yet I turned out to be the only one, so she put on a bunch of expecations on me because I was the one who survived.

She wanted me to be perfect. And I was never that. I loved TV and books and she was proud because I was so smart. Really though, I only enjoyed amassing facts in my silly brain and thinking if I could just be like the characters I saw on TV, maybe I could escape my present life. I hated to pressure to be perfect, to get good grades, that anything less than an A+ was extreme failure.

I remember the first time I wanted to be an anime character, to escape into a world that was better than the one I was living in, where I had presence and control. I used to watch Star Blazers as a child. I wanted to be a part of the Star Force so badly. I squeezed myself into a too small pajama set because it was white, like the uniforms on that show. I crudely tried to replicate the colored striping of those uniforms. And I even started flapping my mouth like an anime character, crudely opening and closing my lips to mimic the characters I so evied on TV. They had adventures and were heroes and were trying to save the Earth. I was probably 7 or 8, and all I wanted was to escape somewhere that wasn’t my home.

I think that was the first time I wanted to “be anime”. But it wasn’t the last, obviously. But I would escape into my imagination. I created whole worlds for my characters to explore, crude approximations of the TV shows and movies I loved. I didn’t even know what fanfic was yet. But I was creating it. In my head. Mary Sues who were just as capable as the characters I saw on TV, but they were better because I made them and that was how I would create such a character who would exist in those worlds.

I did online roleplaying for a long time. And now I do another type of roleplay I guess. It’s come full circle, from the little kid who would pretend to be Derek Wildstar, to the person who pretends to be all these characters now.